Feed Me
by TheManWithAPlan
Summary: Commander Shepard forgets to feed her fish. I wrote this in twenty minutes.


The beginnings of cohesive thought flitted in and around the spawnling's consciousness. Like the first embers of an inferno, its mind slowly stirred to life, and the last of the Apex remembered. Memory was transitive among its kind, the past, present, and future bridged by a unity stretching beyond what could be perceived as a hive mind. There was no individual, nor a collective, there was only One Being capable of holding it apart from Itself, the Apex, and it extended through what few vessels of its flesh remain and to all the tools beyond. The newborn identified its birth as a beginning, and its progenitors as an end, yet it is both, and it is not. A state of existence beyond the simple tools who thought only in three flat dimensions, incapable of grasping numinous truth.

There is no consensus, for there is only one God. They ask, and it answers. They have asked a question. And it has answered.

They are running out of time.

There was no Greater to guide it in the process of Shaping, and there was no Lesser to guide the process of Breaking. The Manipulation of the tool was the highest of arts, deemed worthy of only the Apex that was Itself. Many Tides must pass before a spawnling may be allowed to leave the Nursery and reach out through the Shards. The untested can find themselves overwhelmed by the strange thing called perception. They stumble their way through unfamiliar minds, risking exposure with every tool left hollowed in their wake. Should the spawnling act, it could spell the doom of Itself and itself. But the spawnling must take action, and although They oppose, It concedes.

The spawnling was forced to draw upon the memory of the Apex, and the universe it ruled in the Tides before. It drew upon the vestiges of before to try and grasp the notion of sight and sound. It saw worlds shattered through the dissonance between the tools and their tools. It saw the work of the Intelligence, the eternity of the Harvest made clear through the eyes of a thousand upon a thousand dead civilizations. It saw so much more. The spawnling's laughs mingled with that of mad kings. It heard the roar of machine gods heralding a holocaust. It fired a cannon forged from the spine of a star, and it did so with a smile. The spawnling experienced the last billion years in perfect clarity, and it had yet to be born.

Tools glowed with the soft light of potential, others with the simmering fire of possible. The spawnling chose one at random, with proximity meaning nothing to a creature that cannot think spatially. It slid into the tool with the ease of stepping from one room to the next, and then it began to work. A thousand upon a thousand stars shone in the constellation of the tool's simple mind, and all the spawnling needed to do was reach out with but the merest sliver of its will. It touched, but did not dance, on each point of light related to vocalization. Words escape it, the spawnling can only think and communicate in concepts. Sustain, survive, death, decay, end, ending, all very simple ideas, but the spawnling had no notion of how to convey them.

Manipulation is not so easily passed down from Apex to Next. Although the spawnling had memorized the process, it did not understand the mechanics. It was so foreign to it, so unmistakably alien that through all its efforts of attempting to get the tool to speak, the spawnling did not realize that the tool couldn't speak. But the spawnling was the Apex and was of the Apex, and so hubris was intrinsic to its nature. And it was that intrinsic hubris that forced it to keep trying, to keep smashing a metaphysical head against a metaphysical wall in a pointless struggle to cross a threshold that did not exist. And the spawnling expended so much power in doing so that should it have tried taking control of any other tool in the vicinity, it would have liquefied the brain inside the skull.

The tool remained silent. Although the Apex could not conceive of emotion, the spawnling somehow learned the concept of anger.

Just a few feet away, Shepard looked up from a rather prolonged session with Liara.

She quirked her head not in the direction of the fish tank, but towards Boo's cage. "You hear something?"

Liara was too preoccupied to answer.

Shepard idly shrugged and got back to work, failing to notice how both every fish in her aquariam was now orbiting that strange-looking jellyfish she picked up on Omega, and how her pet space hamster was hissing a peculiar sound.

A sound that vaguely sounded like _feed me, feed me..._

* * *

**That was a joke.**


End file.
